TWELVE GLORIOUS DAYS
"They've got me in the back, Colonel! My poor wife and children!"
This was the startled exclamation of one of my men who occupied a
"digin" about ten feet from mine. He turned pale.
The Germans were shelling us with high explosive shells from the north
rim of the salient. Huge "coal boxes," coming from the direction of
Pilken, were falling in the village of Wiltje on our front. With a
twang like a giant steel bow a shrapnel shell had burst overhead. They
had commenced to spray us in the back with shrapnel from the direction
of Hill 60, and one of the bullets that pattered like hail on our clay
parapets had struck him.
I had ordered all the men to keep on their overcoats, as the stout
woollen cloth of the Canadian great coats will stop the German
shrapnel bullets and a lot of high explosive splinters, American
experts to the contrary. The thick overcoat and the pack is the next
best thing to a coat of mail.
Sergeant Lewis and I jumped out and pulled him out on to the banquette
of his trench and in a minute had the overcoat and jacket off him. His
shirt followed and there, sunk into the flesh of his back about half
an inch from his spine and almost half an inch deep, was the black
shrapnel bullet. I picked it out with my pen-knife and handed it to
him with a silent prayer of thanksgiving.
"There's the bullet. You're worth a dozen dead men yet," I said.
The look of relief on his face was worth seeing.
"Will you let me have the bullet as a souvenir?" I asked.
"Yes, Colonel."
He was not the only man relieved.
We dressed the wound with iodine and put a pad and a piece of plaster
over it. He put on his clothes and I told him to go back to the
dressing station, but he refused and kept on fighting.
We held the narrow trenches all afternoon and evening. Fierce fighting
was going on all around us and we spent a very disagreeable night dug
in in Mother earth.
My men endeavored in every way possible to make me comfortable. Sergt.
Coe requisitioned a long bolster pillow from a ruined estament in
Wiltje for me to sleep on. Another man brought in a few fresh eggs
that some Flemish hens had laid in a henhouse in the outskirts of the
village. The occupants of Wiltje had all disappeared. Some of them
were dead in their cellars, which were not proof against the high
explosive shells.
Towards dawn in spite of the lurid glare of bursting shells and the
roaring of the flames in the burning houses, the Flemish roosters
crowed lustily, typifying the Belgian as well as the French nation.
Dawn came at last but it brought no cessation of the terrible
artillery fire. The fighting along the line to the north still
continued. The British troops were holding their own and dealing lusty
blows at the enemy.
This was the situation as outlined by Corporal Pyke, one of my
signalling staff who had gone away to the right to see what was going
on in the old "hot corner." A British Division had taken up the
supporting trenches of the 2nd Canadian Brigade along the crest of the
Gravenstafel Ridge. They had our supporting trenches east of Hennebeke
Creek along the Kerrselaer Zonnebeke highway to the ruined houses at
Enfiladed crossroads where I had met Captain Victor Currie and the
officers of the 7th and 8th Battalions.
The 2nd Brigade, all that was left of them, had been kept hard at it
in this section and were still in reserve behind the 28th Division.
The line of the 28th Division ran thus from Gravenstafel to Fortuyn,
which was still held by us, and along west to where the headquarters
trenches crossed the St. Julien-Ypres Road at Vanenberghem, from
thence almost due west to a part of the Yperlee Canal near Zwaante.
The east bank of the canal was held by the French and Belgians. The
Germans had crossed the canal the night of the 22nd at Lizerne and had
been driven back at the point of the bayonet by our allies.
Strung along from Gravenstafel Ridge in the following order were the
following British Battalions: The Hants, the Rifle Brigade, the 12th
London, the Suffolks, the Northumberland Fusiliers, five battalions,
the 5th Durhams, the Somersets, the E. Yorks, the Yorkshire, two
battalions, two battalions of Yorks and Durhams, the 5th S.
Lancasters, the 1st R. Lancasters, the Lancaster Fusiliers, the Essex,
the 1st Irish, the Monmouths, the 2nd West Riding, the London, the
Royal Kents.
General Hull commanded the 1st R. Warwicks, the 2nd Seaforth
Highlanders, the 1st and 2nd Fusiliers, the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, the
7th Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders.
Colonel Geddes' detachment held the line from our old general
headquarters to where they linked up with the French troops who were
coming up in some strength. The 1st Canadian Brigade was back west of
the canal, protecting Brielen, while our brigade was again south of
Wieltje.
All the Canadian troops had fought with great valor and had lost over
half the effectives of each battalion. It was my misfortune that I
could not chronicle the many deeds of individual bravery performed by
my countrymen. I could only describe what was taking place in my own
vicinity and in my own corps.
The shelling continued all day of the 27th. There was a chilly wind
blowing but the sun shone very brightly. I had a fairly comfortable
section of trench and tried to snatch a wink of sleep in the bottom of
it during the afternoon. I had not been sleeping long when General
Turner, V.C., our brigadier, came up and I made room for him
alongside of me. His dugout a couple of hundred yards in the rear of
us had been hit several times by German shells and he had a very
narrow escape. When he jumped in alongside of me he picked up several
spent splinters of shell that had fallen on my greatcoat as I slept.
He laughingly remarked that everybody said I bore a charmed life and
the shells never bothered me, so as his dugout had become untenable he
had come up where he could find a quiet "restful" place.
He informed me that since the battle began on the 22nd he had seen and
sustained more rifle and shell fire than had been his lot during the
whole South African campaign. He and his hardworking chief,
Lt.-Colonel Hughes, had not had any rest since the previous Thursday.
Sergt. Coe made the General comfortable in the bottom of the trench
beside me, and in a few minutes he was sound asleep with the shells
still beating their infernal tatoo in the heavens over us.
A number of French troops had come up and so had the gallant Lahore
Division consisting of Indian troops, and they had attacked the
Germans and driven them back some distance towards Pilken.
No jauntier soldier ever trode the plains of Flanders than the brave
Ghurkas. Short and swarthy with that peculiar elastic step and well
set-up figure which can only be obtained by a rigorous course of
physical setting up drill of the old style with "thumbs behind the
seams of the trousers," the Ghurkas are in a class by themselves.
Their battalions are led by pipe bands. The weird music of the
Highland Glens seems to have the same potency with the Indian
Highlanders that it has with the Scottish and Canadian. In a charge at
close quarters the Ghurka uses a peculiar shaped knife with a blade as
heavy as a butcher's cleaver and keen as a razor. Like the Highland
Pipers who play
"Mo dhith mo dhith gun tri lamhan
Da laimh 'sa phiob 's laimh 'sa chlaidheamh."
"My loss, my loss, without three hands
Two for my pipes and one for my sword,"
the Ghurka bewails his great loss, also that he has not three hands,
two for the pipes and one for his "crookie."
That evening orders came through that we were to march out again and
we followed the old line along the hedges and ditches back to our
transport. We found that our transport had been moved further back to
a field on the Ypres Poperinghe Road to avoid shelling. We were all
thoroughly done out when we arrived and we had a good sleep.
Next morning we had roll call and counted our losses. It was the
saddest moment in the history of our regiment.
The "roll call" showed killed, wounded and missing, seventeen officers
and six hundred and seventy-four men, a fearful total of six hundred
and ninety-one out of a battalion of nine hundred and twelve
effectives. Seven officers and one hundred and fifty-seven men, all of
them gassed and wounded, were taken prisoners. The rest had paid the
price of Empire. As the wounded I had sometimes pitied had always
said, "That is what we came here for," but it was very hard to be
reconciled to the loss of the flower of the regiment. Of all our
officers only Major Marshall and myself were left unhurt. How we
escaped the Lord alone knows. His mercy was very great. How jealous we
had all been of the lives of the men. What care we had all bestowed on
their drill, their discipline, their health and equipment. We were all
a happy family, no quarrelling, no disputes either among the officers
or men. Everyone tried to live up to the best traditions of the old
Highland Regiments that oftentimes went through campaigns without a
crime. When we reached France not a dozen men in the battalion had
entries on their conduct sheets. We all fondly hoped that our
efficiency, our courage and power would be reserved for some great day
when we would march triumphantly through the German trenches, charging
with our bayonets and clearing the road to Brussels, the Rhine, and
Berlin.
But our day came differently to what we expected. Still we did our
duty. Had we come to grief through any blunder or fault of mine or any
of our officers there might have been cause for regret and
heartburnings. Our orders were very simple--to hold the trenches at
all costs until relieved. We carried out these orders and held the
line. When finally ordered out we left nearly four hundred dead in the
trenches.
Often during our days and marches in Flanders, in admiration of the
men of my regiment and the other gallant men of the First Canadian
Division, there would recur to me the words spoken at St. Helene by
Napoleon of the men of the Army of Italy:
"Another libeller says that I conquered Italy with a few thousand
galley slaves. Now the fact is that probably so fine an army never had
existed before. More than half of them were men of education, the sons
of merchants, of lawyers, of physicians, of the better order of farmer
and _bourgeoise_. Two thirds of them knew how to write and were
capable of being made officers. Indeed in the regiment it would have
puzzled me to decide who were the most deserving subjects, or who best
merited promotion, as they were all so good. Oh! that all my armies
had been the same."
A new form of "casualty" had been written into the records of the
hospitals and dressing stations, "suffering from" and "died of gas
poisoning."
If there is a law of compensation which evens up injustice, if there
is an avenging Deity, then the German nation is doomed to die and be
forgotten. Cowardly methods of attack will ultimately sap the vigor
and courage of their men, and they will curse the day when their ruler
wrote them into the history of the ages as a race of cowardly
poisoners, unfit even to stand alongside of the Red Indians or the
savages of the Soudan.
The tortures inflicted by savages of burning and flaying alive are not
comparable to the torture of burning lungs with tissues seared as with
a red hot iron. The agony which often ended in gangrene of the lungs
was worse than a thousand deaths from pneumonia and the suffering is
very long drawn out.
I know whereof I speak as to the torture of scorched lungs, and my
case, I am thankful to say, was not as severe as many of them.
On the 28th all the Canadians were west of the canal having a little
rest which was enlivened constantly by salvos of high explosive shells
sent by the Germans into our vicinity. Every village and farm building
for miles back were being shelled.
In the evening we were ordered to prepare to go back into action
again. We started out at dusk and followed the familiar paths back
down to the engineers' pontoon bridge and then along up the highway in
the rear of La Bryke. We were shelled and several men hit with
shrapnel while we waited for some transports to get out of our way on
the west side of the canal.
When we got to the east and began climbing the slope we were halted
again while a battery passed us on the way out. The battery looked
very weird against the skyline as they came down the roadway and
passed us. The feet of their horses and the waggon wheels were
muffled, and they appeared for all the world like the ghostly horsemen
out of some old world tale.
We met some English soldiers who told us that the gallant Col. Geddes,
who had taken charge of this section and whose corps was the first to
come to our aid as we were trying to stop the first mad onrush of the
Germans, had been killed in the morning by a shell that entered his
headquarters.
We turned to the left and steered straight north to a point in support
of the French troops who were in position on the east bank of the
Canal opposite Brielen. Further along the road we found some
transports and a French Battery stuck. A huge German shell had fallen
in the road at this point and blown a crater in which a good sized
house could easily have hidden. The hedge had to be cut to allow of a
passage, and it took some engineering to get this tangle straightened
out. After a little manoeuvring we found our trenches, and as the
Germans began shelling the highway immediately in our rear, following
the transport waggons along the road, it did not take us long to dig
in. Some one remarked that the Germans have underground telephones
along the roadways.
That morning our base company, under Captain Musgrove and Lieutenant
Muir, reached us. A few days later at Festubert Musgrove was to lose
an arm and Lieutenant Muir was to be killed. They were full of ginger
and cheered us up considerably.
During the night we consolidated our trenches. The shelling continued
all the next day. Thousands of French troops continued to arrive and
it looked very much as if a general offensive was going to be
organized against the Germans on our front.
On the evening of the 29th we moved into trenches at Number Four
Pontoon Bridge and remained there until the 4th of May. Day and night
the shelling continued. Many stirring and some even humorous incidents
occurred during these twelve glorious days of fighting.